Navigation device.... Fenix 2??

BeBetter

Hi guys, I'm looking for a bit of advice on a navigation device that I'll need to use for the Art O'Neill Challenge in January. Now before someone chimes in and tells me that I should be using a map and compass then I'll say first that I'm all for pure navigation and I'm looking forward to learning about it but I'm not going to have that done between now and the event as I simply don't have the time. I've decided that I'm going to use a navigation device like I did last year. The second consideration is that I'm going to be running so I need something that I can monitor on the move.

Basically my question is this..... I have a Fenix 2 watch that I use on a day to day basis to track my training. Has anyone ever used one of these to navigate over open mountain, to follow a pre-loaded track in the dark? I'm a bit sceptical about whether it would do the trick effectively? I'm thinking I'd be better off getting my hands on a proper handheld like an eTrex or an Oregon but then that's a significant extra cost and I already have the Fenix 2! I've no problem going out and trying out navigation on the Fenix 2, I just wanted to check if anyone on here has tried it and what they thought, in case I'd be wasting my time

BarryD

Dunno, never used one but from this site: http://gizmodo.com/garmin-fenix-2-watch-review-jack-of-all-trades-master-1622306578

"For starters, the simple act of loading a map onto the watch is a gigantic pain in the ass. You have to install no fewer than three applications on your desktop (Garmin Map Manager, Garmin MapInstall, and Garmin BaseCamp) each of which are roughly as intuitive as doing your own liver biopsy. For my multi-day Zion trek I loaded in a full map of the park, then I tried a couple different way of making routes. Some were just lists of strategic waypoints with names, so we could try to get from one point to the next point, and so on. For other segments of the trail I created custom routes which in theory should have been extremely simple for us to follow. They weren't.
First off, the size and resolution of the black and white screen makes it all but impossible to tell what you're looking at on the map, even when zooming way in or way out (which was far from intuitive to do, by the way). Instead, I more often found myself using a screen that tells you how close you are to the waypoints you've entered. Unfortunately, that merely gives you distances to the waypoints as the crow flies, completely ignoring trails and terrain. This means that sometimes it would tell us the closest waypoint was one we'd already passed half an hour ago and was now 500 feet below us. Fun. It also re-sorts the waypoints by proximity, which makes them much harder to keep track of. Even using the route I had meticulously drawn out using the desktop software didn't help.
Then there was the problem of tracking accuracy. Now, to be fair, in Zion you're often surrounded by steep rock walls, which no handheld GPS is built for, but holy crap the Fenix 2 failed spectacularly here. Instead of just saying "I'm not sure where you are at the moment so I'm going to wait until I have a good satellite lock," it basically wildly guessed, sometimes putting us many miles away. For example, it once thought we'd hiked 22 miles and 6,000 vertical feet in just over an hour, with an average moving speed of 36 MPH. No, we six guys in our mid-late 30s carrying heavy backpacks do not hike faster than Usain Bolt with a rocket up his ass. That said, when hiking in more average terrain around Los Angeles and the Yucatan Peninsula, the GPS did just fine."


Hmm, doesn't sound ideal. If you can load a gpx track on it and view it on a screen along with your current location, you might have a very basic solution but if it's just a numerical measure of how close you are to waypoints, forget it!

Have you a smartphone? Look up www.viewranger.co.uk It's a free app and will display the track and position. Battery life and weather proofing are issues. It works best though with maps on the screen, there's various solutions but the best is our own EastWest Mapping Dublin & Wicklow Mountain map, which you pay for as a download.

hmmm

I've used it for similar and it works fine - battery life might be an issue, but you say you're a runner. Don't leave it until the night to find out whether it works for you though, do a few reccies with the device.

BeBetter

Thanks for the advicer guys, I tried out the Fenix for navigation and I'm sure it would do the trick if you just wanted to eventually pick your way from A to B but as an efficient means of navigation on the run it's just not suitable. I was especially surprised at how much the compass jumped around as I was running, maybe I was expecting too much but i thought for a running/sports watch that it would be more stable.

The last two times I've done Art O'Neill I used viewranger so I'm familiar with that and it works pretty well but I wanted to try something a bit better this time so I've picked myself up an eTrex 30. Should do the trick!

galwaycyclist

BeBetter wrote: »

Thanks for the advicer guys, I tried out the Fenix for navigation and I'm sure it would do the trick if you just wanted to eventually pick your way from A to B but as an efficient means of navigation on the run it's just not suitable. I was especially surprised at how much the compass jumped around as I was running, maybe I was expecting too much but i thought for a running/sports watch that it would be more stable.

The last two times I've done Art O'Neill I used viewranger so I'm familiar with that and it works pretty well but I wanted to try something a bit better this time so I've picked myself up an eTrex 30. Should do the trick!

What you could do is carry a compass and set the bearing off what the watch is giving you. It might mean stopping from time to time to let the watch settle and then set the compass and run off the compass.

sconhome

You should be able to map out the route or export it from Strava / Garmin Connect / MapMyRun as a .tcx or GPX file and upload it to your Fenix 2 and it should navigate you from there. If I can do it with my Polar, Garmin surely can do the same

Worth checking though if you are in the competitive event are you allowed use a GPS device for guidance? All adventure races require you to navigate using maps and compass, be sure before you start to rely on the watch.

BigGeorge

Hey - thinking of buying a garmin fenix 2 SE due to the black on white display with HRM - best price I can find is on wiggle , at about €380, anyone seen any better or have a wiggle discount code? thanks a lot